I Like Big Gods: No Place For Bravery Announced

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I do like a fantasy landscape with ridiculous unearthly scale, and I very much like the look of the ones in the newly-announced No Place for Bravery [official site]. An eerie colossus looms behind distant snowy mountains. A skeletal giant is buried up to its hips in the desert sand, hand still resting on its sword. A huge shadow of a dragon casts your party in darkness. That’s the good stuff. Beyond the pretties, mind, No Place for Bravery is a roguelikelike action-RPG with inspirations including Hyper Light Drifter and the time travel trickery of Super Time Force. Here, watch this trailer:

Ooh what a pretty one! Apparently our party of adventurers are there to duff up “the godlike entities that brought down humankind”.

The brief glimpses of fighting look promising, fast and deadly. The Super Time Force influence comes in the ability to “control more than one character simultaneously-ish by playing with one character and then rewinding time and playing with another character alongside the first one” – think Cursor*10 with swords.

As for roguelikelike components, its fantasy lands are generated procedurally, it’s sprinkled with random events, and yes, it has permadeath. Developers Glitch Factory say player progression won’t come with incremental number increases but new skills, characters, and items augmenting existing abilities or adding whole new ones, which is nice.

No Place for Bravery is due on Windows and Mac “some time in 2017”. You can follow development on its devblog. In the meantime, Glitch Factory’s local multiplayer muderfest Party Saboteurs is still in early access – hey, are y’all going to finish that?

19 Comments

This looks very interesting. I hope the animations shown in this video are not final though. Some of them look like they could use more frames, like that axe swing by the bearded dude at 0:51. The graphical style is alright but as soon as you get “lo-fi” animations for important actions, games tend to feel sloppy and unresponsive.

This looks really cool, and I love the idea of rewinding, switching characters, and being a one man co-op wrecking crew. As kind of an uncoordinated guy, though, I have a long history of bouncing off anything with permadeath (particularly where I don’t feel like I’m making progress in one way or another). I guess my question is, could you elaborate a little on player progression via “new skills” and items etc.? Like, do these skills and items carry over from life to life, or do you start from scratch every time you get killed?

First of all, keep in mind that the game is still early in development, everything I’m about to tell is may and probably will change once we start testing the game.

Structurally the game is going to be similar to roguelites like Spelunky and FTL. On each run you’ll control a different group of characters, all inspired by classic D&D classes. Permadeath is a big part of the game. If a character dies during a run there is nothing you can do to get him back. And if the whole party dies you are going to have to start another run.

When we talk about progression via skills and *interesting* itens we’re really referring to our hate of numbers. As I said before in a forum post:

“Our big inspiration here is Spelunky. There is no levelling up, your characters aren’t going to get more hit points (the game doesn’t even have hit points), they won’t improve their DPS. The only one who’s going to become better over time is the player himself.

There is some progression in the game. You’ll find new characters, items and even new skills along the way, but each will introduce a new mechanic and will force the player to make strategic considerations.

The perfect example here is Spelunky, think of the teleporter or the jetpack, they both represent progression in the game, but instead of just adding +1 to your speed they both add new mechanics that demand skill to be used.

Bravery is primarily an action game and we really think that the players don’t need to see any numbers. They should make their decisions based on what “they feel”, not on the numbers we show them. We think that this will make the strategic part of the game feel way more organic.”

To be honest we’re still not sure how itens/skills/characters will carry over from run to run. Of course we have a lot of ideas, but we’ll have to test them before I can give you a definitive answer. All I can say is that we do want the game to be hard but we obviously don’t want the game to be stressful. It’s a fine balance.

Thanks for the response. It doesn’t sound like my normal cup of tea, at least on paper, but your enthusiasm may have just convinced me to pick up a copy regardless. Good luck with the rest of the development process!